Local author overcomes dumping by Random House

By almost any standard, Lyndhurst novelist Mary Doria Russell is a big success.She followed up two celebrated science fiction novels, “The Sparrow” and “Children of God,” with well-reviewed historical novels including “Doc,” about the relationship between John Henry “Doc” Holliday and Wyatt Earp.But as The Washington Postreports, she's not immune from the perils of being a mid-list author in the high-stakes publishing world.From the story:Just as her new novel, “Doc,” was being released in 2011, she got word that her publisher was not interested in any more books from her. She had been with Random House since 1996 and published five novels with the New York house. During that time, she had won an Arthur C. Clarke Award and an American Library Association Readers Choice Award. Entertainment Weekly had chosen “The Sparrow” as one of the 10 best books of year.But that didn't matter. Random House was done with her.At a recent event near Washington, D.C., Ms. Russell told the audience, “There was no indication that was going to happen. It was like having your husband throw you a 25th wedding anniversary party, and then serve you with divorce papers at dessert.”She remained quiet about Random House's decision, The Post says, because she had to begin her book tour for the novel. “It took me about three months after that till I could breathe right,” Ms. Russell said at the event.

But unlike the experience of many authors, Ms. Russell's tale has a happy ending.Ecco, a division of HarperCollins, last year bought the planned sequel to “Doc,” and Ms. Russell said she expects her new novel — tentatively titled “Epitaph” — to be published in late 2014.Even better, movie director Ron Howard is producing a pilot for HBO based on “Doc” and “Epitaph.” And cable network AMC has bought an option to make a series based on “The Sparrow” and “Children of God.”

This and that

The bounceback continues: The U.S. housing market closed 2012 on a strong note, though Cleveland was not one of the pacesetters.The new Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller Home Price Indices showed home prices ended 2012 with growth of 7.3%, including 5.9% for the 10-city index and 6.8% for the 20-city index.Cities that saw housing prices take a big hit in the recession, such as Phoenix and San Francisco, saw prices rise last year by 23% and 14.4%, respectively.Cleveland, more of a steady performer, saw prices rise just 2.9% for the year, better only than Chicago (2.2% increase) and New York (-0.1%).Let there be light: A Case Western Reserve University professor is quoted in this Wall Street Journal story about advances in treating adult acne “by harnessing the healing properties of light.”Light, administered alone or with pharmaceuticals, “offers fresh options to acne patients for whom existing treatments often are either too powerful or not powerful enough,” according to The Journal.

In a procedure known as “photodynamic treatment,” which has been studied for years, certain pharmaceutical ingredients that are sensitive to light can kill acne when turned on by specific light wavelengths, The Journal reports. (It hasn't yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration as an acne treatment, though it has been approved for other skin conditions.)Off-label photodynamic acne treatments are legal and rely on a doctor's judgment, according to the story."In practice we use kind of what's available and what's practical," says Elma Baron, dermatology professor at Case Western Reserve, who is running a clinical trial of photodynamic therapy to treat a type of skin cancer.Prof. Baron tells The Journal that photodynamic therapy appears to reduce her patients' lesions. But research is limited in terms of which wavelength works best, which dosages and frequencies patients need and how long the effects last.Power shift: A coalition of eight power companies that included Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. lost a court challenge to U.S. rules setting rates that telephone and cable providers must pay to attach lines to electric utility poles.Bloomberg reports that a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., “today upheld Federal Communications Commission rules aimed at simplifying and reducing rates to spur deployment of high-speed Internet service, or broadband, finding the agency's justifications to be reasonable.The power companies “offer neither theory nor fact to contradict the commission's fundamental proposition that artificial, non-cost-based differences in the prices of inputs among competitors are bound to distort competition, handicapping the disfavored competitors and at the margin causing market share and capital to flow to less efficient firms,” U.S. Circuit Judge Stephen Williams wrote in the opinion, according to Bloomberg.The news service reports that lowering rates could cost electric utilities $1.2 billion in foregone fees annually, according to a 2011 estimate by Thomas Magee, an attorney for the coalition of utilities.You also can follow me on Twitter for more news about business and Northeast Ohio.

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